A gripping escape

I finished Kathryn Stockett's debut novel The Help at 4:30 this morning, refusing to spend another night not knowing how the plot would conclude. I will say that I loved quite a few things about it:

• Getting to glimpse 1960s Mississippi from the perspective of three women (two black maids, one white woman) Every few chapters, the narration switches between the women. While the chapter that changes from one woman to the next is named after the woman speaking, the label was really just a gesture because Stockett did an excellent job of distinguishing the three voices.
• Seeing life in those times (shockingly recent) from an under-reported perspective: the non-white view. To quote one of the main characters in the book: "Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it." 
• Digging into the complex relationships and social conditioning resulting from the absurd idea of segregation.
• Gaining Stockett's insights to human nature, relationships and life that are surfaced periodically in the thoughts and words of one of the three women. She manages to include them without making the narrative feel contrived -- something few authors who wax philosophical do well, in my view.

My critical opinion of the book is shaped by the following three factors:

• Experience: Given that Stockett drew on aspects of her own life as the foundation of this book, she is able to create a much more compelling situation and cast of characters than someone like myself who never lived in the Deep South during that period or who never even had a maid at home. That being said, the novel was still written by a white author putting herself creatively in two black women's shoes. I have to wonder how someone who had been in that situation would assess the characters and the reality conjured by the book. 
• Doubt: Stockett does an excellent job of incorporating real-life figures such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and real-life events such as the Birmingham church bombing, Kennedy's assassination, and the march on D.C. as a means of situating the reader within a familiar context. She also uses some of the characteristic violence of organizations like the KKK to reinforce the high-stakes gamble the characters brave in embarking on their communal project. That being said, I was (relieved but) skeptical when I finished the book that we the readers hadn't seen more of that behavior shatter our characters' worlds.
• Oomph: Finally, I felt the book had progressed at such a steady clip, unfolding with such gripping conflict and suspense, that the ending, while logical, underwhelmed me. I had glimpsed Stockett's genius laid bare on the pages leading up to it, I wondered if she couldn't have left the reader with a more dynamic finish.

Overall, though, I found myself fading from my own world's parameters and inhabiting Miss Skeeter's, Aibileen's and Minny's realities with an increasing eagerness as I worked through the book's 464 pages. Having walked with the women through their struggles and triumphs, I closed the book's cover with a renewed faith in humanity's capacity for nobility and absurdity, and a profound love for three women I had had the honor of getting to know in the previous pages.

Tragic truths

I just finished the previously-mentioned Black Like Me, an eye-opening account of the absurdity of racial hatred in our nation's recent history. In the late 1950s, John Howard Griffin, a white journalist from Texas, is haunted persistently by these questions:

"If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South, what adjustments would he have to make? What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin color, something over which one has no control?" 

He decides one night to embark on a seven-week journey that would answer those questions by medically altering his skin color and experiencing the discrimination firsthand. The book is a series of journal entries, beginning the night he decides to pursue this project and ending with the world's reaction to his published work. Griffin's strength as a journalist in documenting his experience lies in his observation skills and his commitment to include details that powerfully evoke these situations for the reader.

In an afterword, Griffin's biographer Robert Bonazzi explains:

The book's evocation of naked experience, of what is being done to the narrator rather than what he does, draws us toward the center, engages our emotions and all of our senses. We view scenes in vivid detail, hear precise tones in the dialogue and interior monologue, smell fear, and taste dread ...

The power of the book is rooted in the uncomfortable truth that many people who were impacted by it would not have listened to its revelations if they were not written by a white man. If he had not been a part of a privileged class and documented the respect and dignity he was freely given before changing only his appearance, his experience would have been written off.

The flaw of the book springs from the same place of its power. While Griffin as a black man relearns social conditioning to act according to societal expectations, and while he approaches each situation with the methodology of a sociologist, he never fully relinquishes his white perspective. There are passages that, though well-intended, come across sounding racially paternalistic. He also has the luxury of being able to escape the despair of the ghetto when it begins to close in on him by asking to stay with a friend in the white area of town.

That being said, the book is still one motivated by a rare sense of humanity and courage, given the time period. Despite its weaknesses, I will echo the back cover's recommendation that this "chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity every American must read."